Republicans vying for U.S. Senate seat differ on immigration
As the two battle for the Republican nomination for the chance to replace Democrat Bob Casey in U.S. Senate, immigration policy is turning out to be one of the biggest differences between them even as they agree on major principles like the need for a southern border wall and a pathway to legal status for Dreamers.
Both say they want to end illegal immigration, but Mr. Barletta, R-Hazleton, would take a harder line, one that Mr. Christiana, of Beaver, believes would break up families and harm the state’s manufacturing industry.
One flash point is the Family Reunification Program, which allows relatives of green card holders to apply for lawful permanent residence. The program accounts for about two-thirds of legal immigration into the country each year, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Mr. Barletta, 62, said the program needs more safeguards to prevent what President Donald Trump refers to as chain migration, a process in which one lawful permanent resident can sponsor a relative who sponsors another who sponsors another.
“That’s a lousy way to have immigration policy in the United States,” said Mr. Barletta, who prefers to reduce the number of immigrants who can enter legally by prioritizing entry for people with needed job skills.
“If you continue to allow in people who will need government assistance it will become a burden on all the working families,” he said.
Mr. Christiana, 34, strongly supports the Family Reunification Program, although he also believes its use should be limited to parents, siblings, spouses and children.
“The family unit is the most important unit in our society, and the Family Reunification Program allows American citizens to connect in America with their immigrant loved ones. It is an awesome program and it should never be repealed,” he said.
He also disputes Mr. Barletta’s assertion that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs from citizens and depressing American wages by flooding the market.
“It ignores one of the greatest challenges facing businesses today, and that’s that there is a workforce crisis. We can’t expect businesses to grow and to hire people if Washington doesn’t fix the policies that are inhibiting growth,” Mr. Christiana said last week after touring PRT Baler & Compactor in Philadelphia, where executives told him they have a dozen job openings that they can’t find skilled workers to fill.
“How long do we have to hear from business owners and industry leaders that there are not enough truck drivers and there are not enough welders and there are not enough upholsterers and there are not enough tool-and-die craftsmen before we change our approach? We needed to update our legal immigration a long time ago,” he said.
The fix for that is more job training, not less restrictive immigration policy, Mr. Barletta said.
“I’m going to disagree that we have to bring in people from other countries to do our manufacturing jobs. The people who have lost their jobs, let’s teach them the skills to do the jobs that actually exist rather than allow someone else to take them,” he said. Still he said, immigration policy should prioritize entry for those with job skills.
Mr. Christiana agreed that better job training — including collaboration between education and industry — is a big part of helping industry thrive but said it isn’t helpful to shut out immigrants the way he believes Mr. Barletta wants to.
“His campaign rhetoric is divisive and it has blurred the lines between illegal immigration and legal immigration,” Mr. Christiana said. “It’s completely unfair to blur those lines.”
Mr. Barletta says he’s not against immigrants at all. Rather, he says he wants to help them.
“I get called a lot of names, but people that know me understand I’m probably the most pro-immigrant person,” he said. “I want people to be able to come. I want them to be able to come legally. I want them to assimilate and I want to bring people in … for the jobs we need” to fill.
Mr. Barletta said he isn’t the anti-immigrant racist political opponents portray him to be. He said he is as compassionate as anyone toward Dreamers – teens and young adults whose parents illegally brought them into the country years ago.
“They came here through no fault of their own, so we want to treat them with compassion,” he said. One solution could be to make them permanent legal residents.
Mr. Christiana wants to create a pathway to legal status for Dreamers as well. The solution might look a lot like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) that Mr. Trump has ended. Although he likes the premise of DACA, he also supported ending it because he believes former President Barack Obama overstepped his bounds by sidestepping Congress and creating it by executive order.
Mr. Barletta said that Congress needs to secure the country’s borders before granting any kind of amnesty to DACA recipients.
“Don’t legalize them while our borders are open because you’ve given them a green light and more people are going to rush into the United States. You can’t signal what you’re going to do until the borders are secure.”
Immigration reform has been a central issue for Mr. Barletta since 2001 when he was mayor of Hazleton and saw his city’s population and need for social services grow but not its tax base. Problems ensued including gang activity, overcrowded apartments, absentee landlords, long wait times in emergency rooms, skyrocketing costs of English as a Second Language classes, and increased crime that he partially attributed to immigrants who came in through New York and Newark, N.J., and overstayed their visas.
Since then he has supported local, state and federal laws that penalize sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with immigration agents, landlords that knowingly house undocumented immigrants, and employers that hire them.
“I actually dealt with it. Nobody else dealt with it. I stood alone in the country by myself. Neither Jim Christiana nor any other politician came to help or speak out,” Mr. Barletta said. “That’s the biggest difference” between him and his primary opponent.
Mr. Christiana sees Mr. Barletta as ineffective in Washington where he has been unable to move any significant immigration legislation during seven years in Congress.
“I’ll figure out a way to make progress” on immigration and other legislative priorities, Mr. Christiana said. “Inaction and the status quo are unacceptable.”
The immigration debate between Mr. Christiana and Mr. Barletta is one that will continue to play out within the Republican Party over the next few years.
Republican candidates will have to figure out how to respond to the changing landscape in a way that will allow them to keep support of traditional conservative voters and win support of new ones whose political engagement was inspired by the president’s fiery anti-immigration rhetoric, said Kristin Kanthak, associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The GOP has a tough needle to thread on immigration moving forward nationally, and Pennsylvania – this primary in particular – is a good harbinger of that,” she said. “Too much anti-immigration rhetoric loses traditional Republican votes in the suburbs, but too little loses those new Republican pockets of voters in places like Allentown and Westmoreland County.”